this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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The kettle?!
Yes. It's not a kettle as in the pot you put on the stove, but an electric water ... heater ... thingy. I honestly have no idea how to call it in english. The german word would be "Heißwasserspender", literally translating to "hot water dispenser". I disassembled it, soldered a tiny raspberry pi board to it that could control the device as you could with the buttons and wrote a rudimentary API that I now control via home assistant.
Within HA, I can control the kettle via calling the API of the pi. For example, I got a script that triggers if my girlfriends phone is entering my WLAN-network.
The call to the API looks like this:
It's dynamic, so for the "default black tea" she likes, these are the arguments
And this is the trigger:
That call is received by the pi, who then triggers the kettle. So every time my girlfriends phone is entering the wifi, it's between 18:00 and 20:00 and there's a cup present (done via a simple proximity sensor that I glued to the side of the kettle. That's also not known to the home assistant, I didn't really know how to feedback that information to it so I just had it handled by the pi itself), the kettle triggers and dispenses hot water. She can also do it manually via the home assistant app, I made a widget for that where you can just select temperature, amount and that's it.
I just hope the thing never breaks because I reassembled it using superglue, but then I noticed I forgot to install SSH on the pi, making it kinda an isolated piece of software that I just hope keeps running indefinitely lol.